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Third Grand Council
The Third Grand Council of the Confederation of North America was elected to a five-year term on 15 February 1853. The partisan makeup of the Third Grand Council was ninety-one Conservative Party and fifty-nine Liberal Party. The Third Grand Council's Conservative majority elected party leader William Johnson of Manitoba to the office of Governor-General on the first ballot. It is not known who was chosen as Majority Leader, though it is likely that the Liberals chose their own party leader, Bruce Harrison of the Northern Confederation, as Minority Leader. Another leading member of the Liberal caucus was freshman Councilman Kenneth Parkes of the N.C., who was serving as military governor of occupied Mexico del Norte at the time of his election. The Third Grand Council was the first ever to have a Conservative majority, it is likely that all the members of Governor-General Johnson's Cabinet were new to government. It is known that Johnson's Minister of the Exchequer, Whitney Hawkins of Indiana, was a financier who had never held elective office before being appointed to his Cabinet post. Despite his inexperience, Sobel states that Hawkins served ably as head of the Treasury. Other Cabinet members who served with distinction include Minister of State Montgomery Harcourt, who was dispatched to London by Johnson to solicit British investment in the C.N.A., and Minister of War John Wolff of Indiana, who traveled to The Hague to negotiate a peace treaty ending the Rocky Mountain War with the United States of Mexico. The Hague Treaty that Wolff negotiated with Senator Frank Rinehart of Arizona ceded the disputed Broken Arrow region of Mexico del Norte to the C.N.A., in return for which the C.N.A. paid N.A. £2,500,000 in indemnities "for slaves who left the United States of Mexico to take up residence in the Confederation of North America, and who for reasons of their amalgamation with the general population cannot be found and returned." Sobel states that the compensation for escaped slaves was a fig leaf to disguise the fact that the payment was actually the purchase price of the Broken Arrow region. The Third Grand Council ratified the Hague Treaty on 7 August 1856, which was then signed by Johnson. Following the final settlement of the war with the U.S.M., Johnson announced his resignation. It is not known whether the Liberals sought to hold a new set of Grand Council elections to cut short the term of the Third Grand Council, or whether the Conservatives believed they could win a new majority in them. In any case, no elections were held, and instead the Conservative caucus met to choose a new governor-general to serve out the remainder of Johnson's term. Johnson indicated that he wished Hawkins to succeed him, and the Conservatives elevated the Minister of the Exchequer to the governor-generalship. Unfortunately, Hawkins proved to be a poor choice. He had ambitions to run for a term of his own in the upcoming 1858 Grand Council elections, and he sought to eliminate potential rivals for the party leadership by replacing Johnson's Cabinet ministers with his own supporters, who were drawn from the financial community. The price of securing their loyalty was allowing them to engage in rampant corruption. The most notorious of Hawkins' men was his Minister of Resources, Bruce King, who over the course of eighteen months managed to embezzle N.A. £500,000 in government funds while accepting an additional N.A. £1,000,000 in bribes. Although Hawkins succeeded in gaining the party leadership for the 1858 elections, the corruption in his administration, combined with his own poor campaigning skills, resulted in the loss of nineteen seats to the Liberals, along with the Conservative majority. ---- Sobel's sources for the Third Grand Council include Simon Hall's How Much? (New York, 1890); Lewis Duane's The Era of Faceless Men: The C.N.A. from 1845 to 1880 (New York, 1931); Franklin Packard's Plenty for Everyone: Corruption in the C.N.A. in the Age of Prosperity (New York, 1950); Milton O'Casey's The Hawkins Administration (New York, 1953); Sidney Bostwick's Every Man Has His Price: The Elections of 1858 (Burgoyne, 1958); Simon Rabbino's The Invasion of the Pound: British Investments in the C.N.A. from 1840 to 1880 (London, 1965); Richard Maxwell's The Prostitutes of Burgoyne: Conservative and Liberal in the Glory Years (Mexico City, 1967); Frank Taft's ''The End of the War: The Hague in 1853-1855 (Melbourne, 1967); Winsor Watkins' The Late Bloomer: William Johnson and the Election of 1853 (New York, 1969); and Leland Turner's Three Bags Full: The King Conspiracy (New York, 1970). Category:Grand Councils